Feds Charge $522K for FOIA Request

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

The Treasury Department, Wood said, is “downright telling us where we can stick it.”

Wood wants the government to produce documents he hopes show where are perhaps millions of dollars of once-frozen assets of a former Libyan-backed company in the United States, which Wood says owes his law firm legal fees. To that end, he is suing the government (.pdf) to comply with the FOIA request and to reduce the bill.

Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill (.pdf).

The monstrous tab, according to a Treasury Department internal audit (.pdf), is about as much as the $527,000 the agency charged last year to process thousands of FOIA requests — recouping what the audit said was about 4.5 percent of its actual costs.

What’s more, Wood said a former Treasury Department official working with him notified the agency to the exact whereabouts of the information.

“We basically told them the exact file cabinet it was in,” Wood said in a telephone interview.

The government said it was charging the “commercial” rate of 20 cents per page plus staff costs, and said the fees could go higher. Media and nonprofits usually are not charged.

The FBI, which also received a similar Freedom of Information Act request from Wood to acquire the same information on the Libyan-backed company — People’s Committee for Students of Libyan Arab Jamahariya — said it would charge $242.20 for 2,523 pages of documents, according to Wood’s lawsuit. The documents, however, have not been forthcoming.

The assets of the company, which subsidized Libyans’ educations in the United States, were frozen in 1986. The freeze was lifted in 2004, leaving Wood to trace the money trail.